Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. Strategy is defined at the intersection of two critical dimensions: Where-To-Play and How-to-Win there. If you didn't have the opportunity to listen Prof. Roger Martin presenting the Strategic Choices concept, or to read his reference book Playing to Win (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013, co-authored with A.G. Lafley), please invest a few minutes in listening to this quick introduction: T

The Role and Use of Matrices in Strategy Execution

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. You might have encountered the term Strategic Horizon in all sorts of circumstances, being interpreted in different ways. From the Strategy Formulation point of view, it is only one thing: The time-frame for which we define our Strategy. It's the current segment of our strategic journey that ends at a point in time called the Strategic Destination, where we evaluate the final success of our

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. I have to admit that I'm more than fed up with all sorts of publicly-expressed opinions that associate OKR (Objectives and Key Results) with Strategy Management or Strategy Execution. I'm talking about statements like this: 'OKR is a great way to connect strategy with execution on a company and team level' 'OKRs are meant to set strategy and goals over a specified amount of time for an organ

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. This is a short one, but for many fellows in need of a logical argument, it may come handy. It's certainly useful for me, as I encounter again and again people trying to solve major, strategic problems by attempting all sorts of tentative solutions, until they reach the right one. Finally. The Trial & Error Approach In many managerial roles, we have to solve problems, fight fires in the most

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. Although PwC's Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company) claims a certain level of thought leadership in regard to the Capabilities-Driven Strategy, the concepts of such strategy model is widely spread throughout the business executives' and management consultants' community, world-wide. The Capabilities System While Strategy& consultants explain, in simple terms, that the Core Capabilities cannot

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author One of the most pressing issues of most executive teams in organizations worldwide is the business execution process. More precisely, the Strategy Execution, or the Strategy-Execution Gap, if you like. It has been advocated over and over again that the processes of Strategy Formulation, Strategic Planning and Strategic Plan's Execution are not ad-hoc ones and that they should be driven by sol

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. When we formulate our Strategy, we have to build a chain of hypothesis, because our Strategy is all about the future. Further on, we do the same thing when we translate the Strategy into a Strategic Plan, to execute the Strategy. On one hand, we have to handle the VUCA context (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) of our business environment's future evolution and, on the other

Mihai Ionescu, Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. If our company would have unlimited resources available, we could build any new Transient Competitive Advantage we would see fit, as often as we want, going after the best possible opportunities in the market and effectively defending against any threats encountered. So we could afford to design a Strategy as bold as we could imagine and implement it as fast as desired. But that's not the cas

Mihai Ionescu - Senior Strategy Consultant, Owner Balanced Scorecard Romania, Author. Where do our Strategic Objectives come from? Of course, not from the magic hat :) Nevertheless, in much too many cases, this is how they seem to appear in our Strategy Map, because the methodology for building it looks like some sort of intuitive, ad-hoc magic process. And yes, we often pay consultants to help us with this, because they seem to be some sort of ... magicians of Strategy (or,